It is natural that cultural and social norms establish specific standards and patterns of behavior. Therefore, they promote different perceptions regarding the way people should behave in different environments, such as at school, at home, or in a cafe. The latter is especially contradicting because sometimes people are frustrated with a visit to a cafe because of certain limitations of their personal space. This is where the Expectancy Violations Theory explains the clients’ expectations regarding personal distance, touch intimate communication, and the content communication, which could differ significantly from the one presented in other social settings. As an example, I have visited the Starbuck caf? to observe the way people behave, communicate, and interact to take a deeper understanding of common patterns of reactions to the violation of personal space, which is largely dependent on age, gender, social class, and cultural affiliation.

Age and gender have a potent influence on the way people behave in the caf?. For instance, I have noticed that people of the older age visit Starbuck for drinking coffee or taking the drink with themselves because of having no time to enjoy coffee at the place. Teenagers were the largest audience in the cafe, talking, interacting, reading books, or gathering groups of people for discussion. The cafe is rarely visited by people of older age, but they tend to buy drinks take it to the office. Interestingly, I have also noticed that the intimate communication is much closer among friends and couples sitting at the cafe, as it can be seen in the street or other places to make sure that their conversation is not heard.

Social class could also play a crucial role in understanding the way the personal space is represented in the cafe. It is evident that people from upper classes prefer to remain distant from the crowd, drinking coffee and focusing on business issues on the laptop. This is a personal observation when a person took the farthest table to separate himself from other clients and enjoy coffee near the window. In contrast, youth did not pay attention to other people sitting nearby, just enjoying communicating, joking and laughing. They also did not care about personal behavior, paying no attention to the reactions of others. However, there were some foreign students who were a bit confused while communicating and were trying to behave calm in order not to intervene with other communication.

Finally, cultural context could also play an important role in understanding the limits of personal space. For instance, students from the Eastern regions, such as Chinese, Arabian, and Japanese were more concerned with retention of personal space and were striving to separate their discussions from others. In fact, the expectancy violation theory is a helpful tool for understanding the underpinnings of intercultural communication and implied message of the visitors. Hence, if certain expectations are violated, some of the individuals react in the corresponding way. It has happened to the Chinese student who left the cafe because there was no separate table and he refused to sit in a company.

In conclusion, it should be stressed that both internal and external factors can affect the way people communicate and interact in social environments. With reliance on the proposed example, it could be stressed that people’s reaction to the violation of personal space is associated with age, gender, social class category, and cultural affiliation. All these aspects play an important role in the formation of behavioral patterns. Furthermore, the given example also provides the evident difference in the ways Western and Eastern societies accept public places.

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Emily works as an editor at https://primeessay.org/. She directly participates in editing and supplementing interesting and unique works for any student, ensuring their correctness and relevance. Emily studied at the Faculty of Philology and holds a master's degree